Saturday, November 30, 2019

Both the proponents and opponents of the so-called Hate Speech
Bill in the Nigerian Senate don’t seem to realize that the bill itself is
fundamentally rooted in, and nurtured by, crass and deep-seated ignorance of the
very meaning of “hate speech.”

Hate speech doesn’t mean speech that hurts the sensibilities
of government officials. Nor does it mean any speech that incites and insults individuals.
It simply means speech that besmirches—and incites violence against— a
community of vulnerable and marginalized people who are easy targets because of
their invariable group attributes such as their ethnicity, religious beliefs,
sexual orientation, racial identity, national origin, gender, age, physical and
mental disability, etc.

That is why Encyclopedia Britannica, in common with most
recognized authorities, defines hate speech as “speech or expression that
denigrates a person or persons on the basis of (alleged) membership in a social
group identified by attributes such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual
orientation, religion, age, physical or mental disability, and others.”

Since government officials aren’t vulnerable and marginalized
people (they’re actually the very opposite of marginalized people) and don’t
constitute a primordial community, they can’t be the victims of hate speech.
Yet Senator Aliyu Sabi Abdullahi, the sponsor of the “hate speech” bill,
recently told the news media that his sponsorship of the bill has exposed him and the bill itself to “hate speech” from Nigerians!

Although both of us share a common Borgu heritage, I don’t
know Senator Abdullahi, but he is obviously an uneducated legislative thug who
would do well to go back to school for his own good and so he would stop embarrassing our
people. Criticizing a clueless, illiterate senator who wants to strangulate
people’s constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech and constrict the
discursive space isn’t, by the wildest stretch of fantasy, “hate speech.”

Senator Abdullahi also said his bill is designed to “seek justice for Aluu 4 and others.” But the “Aluu 4” murder doesn’t exemplify hate
speech by any definition of the term. It was jungle justice. The victims weren’t
murdered because of their ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender, or disability.

Although I am a free speech advocate, I concede that there
are groups of people in Nigeria who need hate speech protection. Here is an incomplete
list of groups that are habitually the targets of hate speech in parts— or all—
of Nigeria, which the bill doesn’t even address:

1. Homosexuals. There is no part of Nigeria where gays
and lesbians aren’t subject to violent denunciations on social media, in the
traditional media, and in quotidian dialogic spaces. In Europe where hate
speech laws are codified, homosexuality is regarded as a “protected attribute,”
and people who slur or incite violence against gays and lesbians can be charged
with violating hate speech codes. Yet the very Nigerian Senate that is sponsoring
a “hate speech” bill has criminalized homosexuality.

2. Shiites. This is perhaps the most vulnerable
Muslim sect in the Muslim North. On social media and in mosques, Sunni Muslims
perpetually direct wild, unrestrained hate speech against Shiites without any
consequences.

They are indiscriminately murdered in the streets by both
everyday Sunni fanatics and the government. Yet the Presidency, to which the
current Senate is a shameful extension of, has officially labeled Shiites, who
have been the victims of murderous persecution, a “terrorist” group.

3. “Fulani herdsmen.” Although the Global Terrorism
Index has consistently ranked “Fulani extremists” as the “the fourth deadliest known terrorist group” in the world, most Fulani people are not terrorists, but
Fulani people, particularly “Fulani herdsmen,” are stereotyped as inescapably
violent and murderous, which exposes them to threats of indiscriminate mass
murders in many parts of Nigeria.

The Global Terrorism
Index’s 2019 report says, “There are an estimated 14 million Fulani in Nigeria.”
It’s impossible for all 14 million Fulani in Nigeria to be terrorists. If that
were true, almost everyone would be dead in Nigeria. Yet in 2017, Apostle
Johnson Suleiman said, “And I told my people, any Fulani herdsman you see
around you, kill him. I have told them in the church here that any Fulani
herdsman that just entered by mistake, kill him, kill him! Cut his head!”

That was classic hate speech that could result in a “hate
crime.” Being a “Fulani herdsman” does not invariably lead to being a
terrorist. To kill someone who has not committed a crime, who just happens to
belong to a primordial category of people who commit a crime, is quintessential
hate crime. Plus, the vast majority of everyday Fulani herdsmen are poor,
illiterate, marginal people whom people and governments habitually cheat and
exploit.

4. Christians in the Muslim North. Christians are an
endangered group in the Muslim North. They are periodically murdered by
homicidal thugs at the slightest provocation. Over the years, certain Muslim
preachers, particularly in Hausaphone Muslim northern Nigeria, have typecast
Christians as expendable, murder-worthy, inhuman outsiders who are invariably
enemies—and who can only be tolerated at best.

The murderous contempt for Christians in the Hausaphone
Muslim North is encapsulated in the odious term “arne,” which means “pagan,”
but which connotes much more than that. The term functions to denude the
humanity of whomever it is directed at. It makes him or her the legitimate target of remorseless cruelty or murder, especially in moments of political or religious
tension in the country. An informed and legitimate hate speech bill would
protect Christian minorities in the Muslim North from rhetorical—and actual—
violence.

5. “Hausas” in the South. In all of Southern Nigeria,
Hausa people (which is linguistic shortcut for all northerners even though the
North is home to more than half of Nigeria’s over 500 ethnic groups) are pigeonholed
as stupid, unthinking automatons who are always roused to mindless violence,
who are indistinguishable from cows.

“Aboki,” the Hausa word for friend, has now been misappropriated
as a term of disesteem to slur northerners. So is “Mallam,” the Hausa domestication
of the Arabic mu’alim, which means teacher, but which is deployed as a
term of courtesy for any male Muslim. It is also usual to call northerners “maalu”
(sometimes malu), the Yoruba word for cow.

The insults, in and of themselves, are not the issue. The
issue is that they homogenize a vast and varied people and prime them for often
retaliatory mass murders. When I was a reporter in Nigeria in 2000, I covered the
retaliatory murders of northerners in the Southeast in response to the Sharia
riots in Kaduna that year. It turned out that most of the “Hausa” people murdered there were,
in fact, Christians from Benue and Kogi states who share common boundaries with
many states in the Southeast.

The survivors I spoke with told me their entreaties that
they were Christians who would have been murdered in Kaduna, along with Igbo
people, had they lived there failed to persuade their tormentors. They were told that they were “abokis,”
“mallams,” or “malos.”

6. Atheists and agnostics. Nigeria is a
hypocritically hyper-religious society with an overabundance of toxic levels of
intolerance for people who choose to question or depart from the orthodoxy of
received spiritual wisdom. People who question or reject the idea that there is
a God who supervises and regulates the affairs of human beings are often reviled
and attacked in almost all parts of Nigeria.

For instance, in 2014, Nigeria attracted global attention—and
ridicule—when an atheist by the name of Mubarak Bala was committed to a psychiatric
hospital in Kano by his family for publicly renouncing his faith in Islam and
God. After he was found to be of sound mind and released, he was welcomed by a
steady stream of death threats.

As is now obvious, hate speech laws all over the world are enacted
to protect weak, defenseless, and marginal social, religious, ethnic, cultural,
etc. groups from the tyranny of dominant, mainstream groups. But Senator
Abdullahi and his uninformed political bedfellows are more concerned about
protecting oppressive, overpampered, corrupt, and unaccountable government
officials from the searing scrutiny of the governed than protecting weak, marginal
populations.

Postscript:

Many Igbo commenters are crossed that I left out Igbos in my
list of vulnerable groups that need hate speech protection. They are right to
be disappointed.

However, I couldn't include every group. That was why I
called it "an "incomplete list." This is a newspaper column with
a word limit, which I actually exceeded by over a hundred words. I thought
identifying "Christians in the North" as a vulnerable group takes
care of Igbos because most people in the Muslim north who kill Igbos at the
slightest provocation can't tell Igbos from other ethnic groups in the South.
It is their Christian identity that stands out. But I agree that Igbos are an endangered group in the Muslim North.

Another group that I wanted to include but didn't have the
space to include is women. Well, I'm glad this intervention is sparking the
right conversation about what hate speech really means.

Saturday, November 23, 2019

Before he was sworn in as president in May 2015, Muhammadu
Buhari, without prompting from anybody, publicly told his immediate and extended
family members to stand back from his incoming government. He even warned that
any family member who used his name to peddle influence would face dire
consequences.

I was so impressed by this declaration that in my May 16,
2015 column titled “6 Reasons Why Incoming Buhari Government Fills Me with Hope,”
I isolated it as one of the six reasons I thought Buhari’s administration would
“represent a qualitative departure from the legalized banditry that has passed
for governance in Nigeria for so long.” Specifically, I wrote: “Buhari’s
symbolic but nonetheless significant gestures like telling family members to
steer clear of his government and telling aides to obey traffic laws inspire me.”

It has turned out that Buhari lied, as usual. There is no equivalent
in Nigeria’s 59-year history for the height, depth, breadth, and width of his
family members’ offensively brash influence peddling and direct involvement with
and in his government. None at all! Buhari operates an unabashed “familocracy,”
that is, a government that is run by family members for the benefit of family
members.

On November 10, 2019,
I used my Twitter and Facebook timelines to share the names of four biological
relatives of Buhari’s who work in the Presidential Villa. However, further investigations have shown that there are way more relatives of Buhari’s (and Mamman Daura’s) who
work in the Villa—and in the Katsina State government—than I shared.

Even Buhari family members who are
not directly in government are ruthlessly avaricious influence peddlers. There
is no Buhari relative today, in and out of government, who isn’t a multi-millionaire.
In Daura, they are called “the blood.” They are tastelessly showy and egotistical.
They ride the biggest and most expensive cars, own the choicest houses in town,
and ride roughshod over people less fortunate than they are.

There’s a widespread joke in Daura that goes something like,
“Want to change your one thousand naira note? Go to Shaiskawa.” Shaiskawa is
the part of Daura town Buhari and his relatives (or “the blood”) come from. The
Buhari family members’ exhibitionistic preening of their newfound wealth is
particularly amusing to Daura people because most of Buhari’s nouveau-riche relatives
used to vegetate in squalid poverty up until 2015.

Here is a partial list of “the blood” who constitute the nucleus
of Buhari’s familocracy. I’ve confirmed these names from multiple sources in
Daura and the Presidential Villa:

1. Abdulkarim Dauda. He is Buhari’s Personal Chief Security
Officer (PCSO). Like Mamman Daura, he is Buhari’s nephew. His father, Dauda
Daura, is Buhari's half-brother from the same father. He is de facto president
Mamman Daura’s full biological brother. I exposed a recent secret memo that Buhari sent to the Nigeria Police (where Abdulkarim is officially employed as
Commissioner of Police after three unnaturally and undeservedly rapid
promotions in three years) instructing it to circumvent time-honored public
service rules and extend his service till 2023 even though he should have
retired this year on account of being in service for 35 years.

2. Sabiu “Tunde” Yusuf. He is Buhari’s Private Secretary.
Don’t be deceived by the “Tunde” in his name. It’s just a nickname, probably
inspired by Tunde Idiagbon, Buhari’s deputy when he was a military dictator.
Sabiu is the son of Mamman Daura’s full biological sister by the name of Hajia
Halima (more popularly known as “Hajja Madam” in Daura) who died last year. As
you should know by now, Mamman Daura’s sister is Buhari’s niece since their
father (Dauda Daura) is Buhari’s much older half-brother.

Sabiu "Tunde" Yusuf

Sabiu, who is in his 30s, is one of the most powerful people
in Nigeria today. He determines who sees and who doesn’t see Buhari. Only
Mamman Daura and Abba Kyari can overrule him.By several accounts, he is now a multi-billionaire, although he had no
formal work experience before Buhari became president. He used to sell phone recharge
cards in Daura until 2015!

3. Dauda “Zeze” Habu. He is Senior Personal Assistant to
Abba Kyari, Buhari’s Chief of Staff who is actually the de facto acting
president/VP. His father, Habu Kurma, is Mamman Daura's younger brother. That
means his father is Buhari’s nephew.

(The formerly unemployed husband of Fatima Mamman Daura—Mamman
Daura’s favorite daughter— is also Abba Kyari’s PA. Fatima, too, is now a director
in the newly created Ministry Of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management, and
Social Development and actually runs the ministry).

4. Musa Haro. He is PA (Domestic Affairs) to Buhari. His
mother, Hajia Kwalla, is Buhari’s biological sister. Hajia Kwalla is a twin.
Her twin sister is called Hajia Amadodo. Musa appointed his brother, Hamisu Haro,
as his his PA! That’s a PA to the PA! Anything to keep it in “the blood.”

5. Musa Musa Daura (known more popularly as “Musa Terror” in
Daura because of his notoriety for murderous violence) is PA to Buhari’s ADC by
the name of Lt. Col. M. Lawal Abubakar. Buhari and Musa Terror’s grandmother,
Hajia Amadodo, are full siblings. Lt. Col. Lawal is also married to Musa Terror’s
full sister. It’s noteworthy that Musa Terror’s father is the Magajin Garin
Daura who was kidnapped recently.

6. The House of Representatives member representing the
Daura/Sandamu/MaiAdua Federal constituency by the name of Fatuhu Muhammad is
the son of Buhari’s late older brother (same father, same mother) by the name
of Muhammadu "Mamman" Danbafale. People in Daura told me Fatuhu, who
graduated from ABU with a Third Class degree in political science in 2009, improperly
rode on the coattails of his uncle to his position; they said he became the APC
candidate for House of Representatives without undergoing a “proper primary” election.

Fatuhu Muhammad is his uncle's look-alike

He recently attracted national attention when he revealed,
obviously without intending to, that the land border between Daura and Niger Republic
isn’t closed, contrary to government propaganda.

7. Rabiya Muhammad Daura. She has been nominated as a
commissioner in Kastina State. She is the only woman in the state’s 17-member cabinet.
She is the daughter of Mamman Danbafale (Buhari’s late older brother) and full sister
of Fatuhu Muhammad.

8. Nuhu Dauda. He is an assistant to the Minister of State
for Petroleum, Timipre Sylva, and the family’s “eye” in the ministry. He is Abdulkarim Dauda’s full brother (see number
1 above). That means he is Buhari’s nephew since his father is Buhari’s
half-brother.

Bonus:

9. Ahmed Rufa'i Zakari. He is Special Adviser to the
President on Infrastructure. He isn’t Buhari’s biological relative, but he is
his relative by marriage and informal adoption. Ahmed’s mother is Mrs. Amina
Zakari, the controversial INEC commissioner who, along with compromised INEC
chairman Mahmood Yakubu, helped Buhari to rig the 2019 election. Buhari’s older
sister was married to Amina Zakari’s father, the late Alhaji Hussaini Adamu.
Apart from being Buhari’s in-law, the late Hussaini Adamu also raised Buhari
for some time after Buhari’s father died, so he was, in a sense, Buhari’s
adoptive father.

I got at least a dozen other names of Buhari’s blood
relatives who work in the Presidential Villa and in “lucrative” ministries at
the federal and state levels, but I didn’t have the time—or, frankly, the
inclination—to verify the information from sources because the point has already been made.

My whole interest in this is to record it for posterity that
Nigeria once had a “president” by the name of Muhammadu Buhari who gratuitously promised
that his nuclear and extended family members would never participate in his
government but who turned out to be the most nepotistic leader Nigeria ever had;
who perpetrated familocratic excesses with both reckless impunity and unparalleled
shamelessness.

Saturday, November 16, 2019

Mamman Daura, the guileful, influence-peddling son of Buhari’s
oldest half-brother who rules Nigeria from the background of the “Glass House”
in the Presidential Villa, turned 80 on November 9. After sponsoring a cornucopia
of hagiographic birthday tributes in newspapers, Daura jetted forth to London—along
with more than 30 family members—to celebrate at a high-priced London hotel.

His children recorded the glitz, vanity, and epicurean
indulgence of the London birthday celebration and shared it with their friends.
Somehow, it seeped out to the public and became the trigger for the ventilation
of pent-up angst over the Buhari regime’s enduring hypocrisy.

In the cloying tributes written about him on the occasion of
his birthday, Mamman Daura was variously—and falsely— described as modest, patriotic,
self-effacing, unassuming, and contemptuous of conspicuous consumption. Yet he
chose to celebrate his birthday, along with scores of nuclear and extended
family members—and government officials—in London. Would it diminish the
significance of his milestone if he celebrated his birthday in Abuja—or, in
fact, Daura, his place of birth?

Where is the patriotism in celebrating birthdays on foreign
soil? Where is the modesty in putting more than 30 family members in first-class
flights to London to celebrate a mere birthday while millions of Nigerians,
particularly in his hometown of Daura, writhe in unutterable pauperism?

The London birthday bash, incidentally, is co-extensive with
Muhammadu Buhari’s presence in London on a "private visit" with
public funds. People were understandably crossed that Buhari and Mamman Daura,
Buhari’s chief puppeteer, were luxuriating in sybaritic pleasures abroad at a
time they selectively closed the borders at home, insisted poor people must eat
only local rice, and deepened the misery of everyday Nigerians like never before.

In the aftermath of
the online backlash that the video of Mamman Daura’s London birthday touched
off, family members of Daura attempted to withdraw the video from circulation.
For instance, a Facebook friend of mine by the name of Dr. Bello Inua Anka, who
is married to one of Mamman Daura’s daughters, said I should take down the
video from my Facebook and Twitter timelines.

The pretext he used to justify his take-down request was
that two of his children were in the video and were being exposed to “hatred.”
He said there were “security issues involved” in sharing the video publicly.

I told him I didn’t see anyone say anything about any child
in the video. Everyone's focus was on the hypocrisy of closing the borders at
home, insisting that traumatized, poverty-stricken people live within their
means, using security agencies to physically humiliate and harass poor people
for eating foreign rice, etc. while Buhari's family members, and a few favored
ones, live off the fat of the land at home and abroad, even going so far as to
celebrate the birthday of Buhari’s nephew in London— with ministers and
senators in tow. Not even Jonathan was this audaciously insensitive and duplicitous.

I didn’t shoot or edit the video, I reminded him. The video
was shot, edited, and shared by his in-laws before it slipped away from their
grip. Why should I edit or take it down? His response was baffling. “Your page
has more exposure than most, there are security issues involved here. A lot of
people with a grudge or another will always pay a visit to your page to feed
off what you write,” he said.

How does the appearance of indulgent, well-clad, and
well-fed children in a video pose “security issues” when they live privileged,
sheltered lives, which ensures that they won’t be in harm’s way? In Bello
Anka’s village in Zamfara State, hundreds of thousands of poor kids, through no
fault of theirs, are in real danger because they can't feed, because bandits
terrorize them and their parents, and because they can't go to school, ensuring
that their unfortunate condition will be perpetuated inter-generationally. That’s
where the real “security issues” are. But he doesn’t care. The poor don’t
matter.

When he didn’t succeed in persuading me to take down the
video, he started to threaten me. “By all means don't take it down please. I wasnt
[sic] actually begging you just so we are clear. I was being civil by asking
you privately. I also said edit if you can and continue with your lunacy. I am
indifferent to your grievances against the Nigerian government...I promise you
won't get away with this… as long as that video remains on your wall. You
clearly have no idea what you are dealing with. You believe too much in your
own hype,” he wrote.

Because I’ve received several anonymous death threats from supporters of the Buhari regime,
including a recent one where someone publicly called for my execution—alongwith Chidi Odinkalu and Ahmed Salkida— on Twitter, I decided to make the man’s
threats public because he has a name, a face, and a place in the Buhari/Mamman
Daura family that can be held accountable if anything happens to any member of
my family in Nigeria because he knows he can’t do anything to me in the US.

Interestingly, this
same witless, power-intoxicated buffoon used to fawn over me when I held
Goodluck Jonathan’s feet to the fire before 2015. Because he and his parasitic,
no-good in-laws are now milking the national cow, he wants me to look the other
way as they perpetrate their corruption, nepotism, cronyism, and impunity.

When threats did nothing to get me to take down the video, the
Mamman Daura family persuaded Facebook and Twitter that the video I shared of
the children, grandchildren, in-laws, and Nigerian government officials
(including a senator and a minister) celebrating Mamman Daura's 80th birthday
at a pricey London hotel was "private media." So they both took it down on November 14.

Scores of people have also shared the video on Facebook and
Twitter. Why am I the only one they're worried about? Bello Inua Anka said I
believed “too much” in my own “hype.” But it’s actually the other way round: it
is he and his corrupt, profligate in-laws who believe in their hype about me.
There are thousands of Nigerians with way more social media following and influence
than I, but it’s my social media commentaries they are disproportionately obsessed
with.

Well, although the video no longer appears on my social
media timelines, it has already gone viral and is, in fact, archived on this blog. It has
also been shared on many other Internet platforms. Will the Mamman Daura family
persuade, for example, YouTube and WhatsApp to take down the video? Will they
ask Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, LG, etc. to take down the video from millions of
computers and phones?

Why are they embarrassed by the video? Of course, it’s
because it calls attention to their extortionate profligacy, to their hypocritical
licentiousness, to their objectionable immorality, to their ice-cold disdain
for the poor, and to their reprehensible double standard.

They haven't realized that by getting Twitter and Facebook
to take down the video from my social media timelines, and the online buzz this
has created, they've made the video even more popular than it deserves to be. Now
if you type "Mamman Daura birth…" on Google, Google’s autocompletion automatically
suggests “Mamman Daura birthday video.”

That means a lot of people are
searching for it. According to Google, “The search queries that you see as part
of Autocomplete reflect what other people are searching for and the content of
web pages.” The forbidden fruit, they say, tastes the sweetest.

These Buhari/Mamman Daura folks obviously have the IQ of
their shoe sizes. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of people have
already seen, shared, and downloaded the video. Only imbeciles lock the barn
door after the horse has bolted.

Tuesday, November 12, 2019

A man by the name of Dr. Bello Inua Anka, who is married
into the Muhammadu Buhari family, is threatening me over the PUBLICLY available video that I—and thousands of other Nigerians—shared on social media showing de
facto president Mamman Daura celebrating his 80th birthday with (more
than 30!) family members and government officials in a posh London hotel while
people starve to death in Nigeria. (See screenshots of his threats).

He asked me— and reached out to a valued friend of mine to
prevail upon me— to take down the video on the excuse that his children are in it
and that they’re being endangered. How? As I told him, I haven't seen anyone
say anything about any child in the video. Everyone's focus is on the hypocrisy
of closing the borders at home, insisting that traumatized, poverty-stricken
people live within their means, using security agencies to physically humiliate
and harass poor people for eating foreign rice, etc. while Buhari's family
members, and a few favored ones, live off the fat of the land at home and
abroad, even going so far as to celebrate the birthday of Buhari’s nephew in
London— with ministers and senators in tow. Not even Jonathan was this
insensitive and hypocritical.

I didn’t shoot the video. It isn’t exclusive to me. In fact,
it had already done the social media rounds before I shared it on my social
media handles. The video was shot, edited, and shared by a member of the Buhari
family. Why should I edit or take it down? He said, “Your page has more exposure
than most, there are security issues involved here. A lot of people with a
grudge or another will always pay a visit to your page to feed off what you
write.” Huh?

Anyway, if his threat is limited to suing me in US courts
where I live and work, I’m waiting for him. I’ve already notified my lawyers
here. But there’s something darker and more sinister in the threat “I promise
you won’t get away with this.” I’ve received countless threats from supporters
of Buhari’s fascist monocracy. Someone even called for my execution—along with Chidi
Odinkalu andAhmed Salkida— on Twitter last week. I dismissed it as the inconsequential
overzealousness of a faceless Buhari Media Center (BMC) troll.

But Dr. Bello Anka has a name, a face—and a place in the
Buhari family— that can be held to account if anything happens to any member of
my family in Nigeria because he knows he can’t do anything to me in the US.

Interestingly, this same witless, power-intoxicated buffoon used to fawn over
me when I held Goodluck Jonathan’s feet to the fire before 2015. Now that the “spoon”
is in his mouth, he wants me to let him and his parasitic family members to get
away with their unexampled corruption, nepotism, cronyism, and impunity. Ain’t
gonna happen!

Sunday, November 10, 2019

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
In 2015, Buhari warned his family members to steer clear of his government. He lied. His relatives, many of whom wallowed in grubby poverty before 2015, not only now work as his official assistants, they’re now multi-millionaires. Some are billionaires. Here are 4 blood relatives of his that I know for a fact work for him. There may be more. I’ve confirmed these names from multiple sources in Daura and the Presidential Villa:1. Abdulkarim Dauda. He is Buhari’s Personal Chief Security Officer (PCSO). Like Mamman Daura, he is Buhari’s nephew. His father, Dauda Daura, is Buhari's half-brother from the same father. He is de facto president Mamman Daura’s full biological brother. I exposed a recent secret memo Buhari sent to the Nigeria Police (where Abdulkarim is officially employed as Commissioner of Police after three unnaturally rapid promotions in three years) instructing it to circumvent time-honored public service rules and extend his service till 2023 even though he should have retired this year on account of being in the police for 35 years.

Abdulkarim Dauda

2. Sabiu “Tunde” Yusuf. He is Buhari’s Private Secretary. Don’t be deceived by the “Tunde” in his name. It’s just a nickname, probably inspired by Tunde Idiagbon, Buhari’s deputy when he was a military dictator. Sabiu is the son of Mamman Daura’s full biological sister by the name of Hajia Halima (more popularly known as “Hajja Madam” in Daura) who died last year. As you should know by now, Mamman Daura’s sister is Buhari’s niece since their father (Dauda Daura) is Buhari’s much older half-brother.
Sabiu, who is in his 30s, is one of the most powerful people in Nigeria today. He determines who sees and who doesn’t see Buhari. Only Mamman Daura and Abba Kyari can overrule him. By several accounts, he is now a billionaire, although he had no formal work experience before Buhari became president. He used to sell recharge cards in Daura until 2015! 3. Dauda “Zeze” Habu. He is Senior Personal Assistant to Abba Kyari, the de facto acting president/VP. His father, Habu Kurma, is Mamman Daura's younger brother. (Kurma is the Hausa word for deaf. He’s called Kurma because he’s deaf, but this isn’t derogatory in Hausa culture where people are habitually identified by their disability).4. Musa Haro. He is PA (Domestic Affairs) to Buhari. His mother, Hajia Kwalla, is Buhari’s biological sister. Hajia Kwalla is a twin. Her twin sister is called Hajia Amadodo. My friends from Daura told me last week that Musa “ just bribed the Emir of Daura to be conferred with the traditional title of Dan Madamin Daura.”

Musa Haro

Bonus:5. Ahmed Rufa'i Zakari. He is Special Adviser to the President on Infrastructure. He isn’t Buhari’s biological relative, but he is his relative by marriage and informal adoption. Ahmed’s mother is Mrs. Amina Zakari, the controversial INEC commissioner who, along with compromised INEC chairman Mahmood Yakubu, helped Buhari to rig the 2019 election. Buhari’s older sister was married to Amina Zakari’s father, the late Alhaji Hussaini Adamu. Apart from being Buhari’s in-law, the late Hussaini Adamu also raised Buhari for some time after Buhari’s father died, so he was, in a sense, Buhari’s adoptive father.6. The House of Representatives member representing the Daura/Sandamu/MaiAdua Federal constituency by the name of Fatuhu Muhammad is the son of Buhari’s older brother by the name of Muhammadu "Mamman" Danbafale. Fatuhu became the APC candidate without “proper primary,” as a source told me.
Also remember that Buhari created an entire ministry for his dabino-stealing former mistress, Ms. Sadiya Umar Farouq. I doubt that there’s any parallel in Nigeria’s history for the magnitude and severity of nepotism and personalization of power that we’re seeing now.

Here's a video of Mamman Daura, Nigeria's de facto president, celebrating his 80th birthday in LONDON with his children, grandchildren, and political associates, including Senator Amosun and Aviation Minister Hadi Sirika.

His uncle, Muhammadu Buhari, is also in London on a "private visit" with public funds. They luxuriate in sybaritic pleasures abroad, close the borders at home, inflict hardship on the middle class, and tell the poor to eat only local rice. Apparently, the good things of life are the exclusive preserve of Buhari, his family, and a select favored few.

Saturday, November 9, 2019

News of the disqualification of the Nollywood movie “Lionheart”
from contention in Oscar’s “International Feature Film” category for this year on
account of its use of English in most of its dialogue has once again
centralized conversations about the role of English in the constitution of the modern
Nigerian identity.

But, first, the outrage over Lionheart’s
disqualification is, in my opinion, unwarranted since the rules clearly state
that to be eligible to vie for that category, a film must have “a predominantly
non-English dialogue track,” and Lionheart’s dialogue is predominantly
English.

Nor is “Lionheart” the only—or, for that matter, the first—
English-language international film to be disqualified from the Oscars because of
its use of English. The New York Times of November 5, 2019 reported that “The 2015 Afghanistan entry ‘Utopia’
and the 2007 Israeli film ‘The Band’s Visit’ were both likewise declared
ineligible” because the dialogues in them are predominantly English.

Nonetheless, I’ve read several Nigerians vent their frustration
over the fate “Lionheart” has suffered at the Oscars by suggesting that Nigeria
should abandon English as its official language and adopt one of its more than
500 languages as its lingua franca. Of course, that’s sheer wishful thinking.

As I’ve argued many times in the past, the English language
is at the core in the constitution of the modern Nigerian identity. Without it,
Nigeria in its present form would cease to exist.

In an April 24, 2010 article,
I argued that “English is the linguistic glue that holds our disparate,
unnaturally evolved nation together. Although Nigeria has three dominant
languages, it also has over 400 mutually unintelligible languages. And given
the perpetual battles of supremacy between the three major languages in
Nigeria—indeed among all the languages in the country—it is practically
impossible to impose any native language as a national language. So, in more ways
than one, English is crucial to Nigeria's survival as a nation. Without it, it
will disintegrate!”

“Most importantly,
[English] is the language of scholarship and learning. The Science Citation
Index, for instance, revealed in a 1997 report that 95 percent of scholarly
articles in its corpus were written in English, even though only half of these
scientific articles came from authors whose first language is English
(Garfield, 1998). Scores of universities in Europe, Africa, and Asia are
switching to English as the preferred language of instruction.

“As Germany’s Technical University president Wolfgang
Hermann said when his university ditched German and switched to English as the
language of instruction for most of the school’s master’s degree programs,
‘English is the lingua franca [of the] academia and of the economy’ (The Local,
2014). His assertion has support in the findings of a study in Germany that
discovered that publishing in English is ‘often the only way to be noticed by
the international scientific community’ (The Local, 2014).

“So most academics in the world either have to publish in
English or perish in their native tongues. In addition, it has been noted in
many places that between 70 and 80 percent of information stored in the world's
computers is in English, leading a technology writer to describe the English
language as ‘the lingua franca of the wired world’ (Bowen, 2001).”

English has moved beyond being imperialistic; it's now
hegemonic. That is, its dominance isn’t a consequence of forceful imposition;
it’s now entirely voluntary. When German, Italian, Israeli, Asian etc.
universities switched to English as their medium of instruction, they didn't do
so because they were conquered by Britain or the US.

When millions of Chinese people spend time and resources to
learn English, they do so because they want to be competitive in the global
market. When South Koreans go to the ridiculous extremes of spending thousands
of dollars to perform surgery on their tongues so they can speak English with
native-like proficiency, they do it of their own volition. (In South Korea,
professors can’t be tenured, i.e., granted permanent employment status, if they
don’t demonstrate sufficient proficiency in English).

When poor, struggling Indians spend scarce resources to
acquire proficiency in English and to “dilute” their accents so they can
approximate native-speaker oral fluency preparatory to call-center jobs, they
do so because they think it offers a passport to a better life.

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek once argued that people
who are targets of hegemonic cooptation only voluntarily agree to this process
if they believe that, in accepting it, they are giving expression to their free
subjectivity. That's effective hegemony.

If English ceases to be the receptacle of vast systems of
knowledge that it is now and goes the way of Latin, everyone would drop it like
it's hot. This isn't about "race," "inferiority,"
"superiority," or such other piteous vocabulary of the weak. It's
plain pragmatism.

This isn't about English as a language of culture, or as a
symbol of colonial domination; it's about the fact that it is the depository of
contemporary epistemic production and circulation. You shut it out at your own
expense. It is hard-nosed pragmatism to embrace its epistemic resources both
for development and for subversion.

Of course, English won't always be the language of
scholarship. Like Latin, Arabic, Greek, etc., it would wane at some point,
especially when America ceases to be the main character in the movie of world
politics and economy, which Trump's emerging fascism is helping to hasten
faster than anyone had imagined. It could be succeeded by Mandarin. Should that
happen, it would be counterproductive for any country in the world to, in the
name of nativist linguistic self-ghettoization ignore Mandarin.

I have argued elsewhere that there is no truth to the
oft-quoted claim that no society develops on the basis of a foreign language.
On the contrary, it is misguided nativist linguistic self-isolationism that
actually hurts development.

Rift in the Presidency

Yemi Osinbajo's media aide, Laolu Akande, tweeted that
"a list circulating in the media on... so-called sacked presidential aides
is not genuine and ought to be ignored.” Hours later, Buhari's media aide, Malam
Garba Shehu, counter-tweeted that, "The Presidency wishes to confirm"
that the list was genuine and that it was "not personal or targeted to undermine
the Vice President’s office."

Yet they both insist that there's "no rift"
between Buhari and Osinbajo! What else must exist to show proof of a “rift”? Fisticuffs
between Buhari and Osinbajo? Or a slugfest between Buhari’s aides and Osinbajo’s
aides? The Buhari regime obviously needs its own English dictionary to
accommodate the unending schizophrenic quirks it evinces in the usage of
English words by its propaganda honchos.

Even when you do your darndest to keep Nigeria's official
idiocy out of your life for your own sanity, it keeps coming at you with
pigheaded insistence.

Friday, November 8, 2019

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
I first learned this lesson from my wife's mother, who is American and who taught mathematics in Nigeria for nearly three decades before she relocated to her home country after retirement.
She taught at (and later became the principal of) Borgu Secondary School in New Bussa, which is now in Niger State. New Bussa used to be my local government headquarters until 1988. So several people from my part of Borgu (which is in Kwara State) attended Borgu Secondary School and were taught by my mother-in-law whom I never knew until I came to America.

My mother-in-law Mrs. Cecilia Crump Erinne

She was an inspirational teacher who produced generations of doctors, engineers, professors, etc. She was particularly popular with students because, being American, she never physically hit a student--like other teachers did. Plus, students loved her American accent and her self-conscious efforts to speak like Nigerians.
Anyway, many people from my area who discover that I'm married to her daughter always ask to speak with her through me, and on no occasion did she ever say she didn't recognize a past student. So I told her she must have an uncommonly capacious memory to remember all her former students, given that she taught almost every student in the school from the 1970s to the early 2000s.
She admitted that it was not humanly possible to remember all her former students and added, "Don't ever tell a past student you don't remember them." You may mess up with their most cherished school memories, she said.
I had a recent experience that materialized this priceless pedagogical wisdom for me. I had an influential Ghanaian teacher in my secondary school that I couldn't stop to think about more than 30 years after he was forced back to his country by the infamous "Ghana-Must-Go" madness. He not only molded me at the inchoate stage of my intellectual development, he was also like a father to me.

My Ghanaian teacher Mr. Selby Lewis

He taught me karate and soccer outside school and often visited my family house. He praised my littlest accomplishments to high heavens and explained away my failings. He was also a philosopher whose delicate words of wisdom still abide with me today.
One day, on a whim, I decided to use by cyber-sleuthing skills to look for him. After days of search, I found him! He was excited to hear from a former student of his, but he said he had not the faintest recollection of me and what we did together. I was incredibly heartbroken and went into a mild situational depression for at least a week.
I still cherish him and nurse no hard feelings toward him for not remembering me. He told me the "Ghana-Must-Go" immigration purge was a traumatic experience for him. He probably chose to wipe clean his memories of Nigeria in order to cope with the emotional aftermath of the purge.
But my experience dramatizes the truism of my mother-in-law's exhortation that, if you can help it, don't ever tell a past student that you don't remember them.

Thursday, November 7, 2019

Why do most Nigerians, including educated Nigerians, pronounce Google as "goggle" and WhatsApp as "WhatsUp"?

As I pointed out in my 2015 book titled Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World, two "O's" always make the long "uu" sound; that's why we pronounce book as "buuk," good as "guud," hood as "huud," etc.

What explains the choice of Nigerians to pronounce Google as "goggle," which, among other things, means to look stupidly? I'm sorry, but people sound really stupid and illiterate when they call Google "goggle."

And WhatsApp as "WhatsUP"? What's up with that? Who comes up with these grating, uneducated pronunciational habits in Nigeria? Since Nigerians don't call phone apps "ups," why do they call WhatsApp "WhatsUP"?

Yes, the inventors of WhatsApp were clearly creatively playing on the informal American English expression "what's up?" (i.e., "how are you?") in the choice of the name for the app, but the name clearly has "app," not "up," in it.

Tuesday, November 5, 2019

This was first shared on my Facebook and Twitter handles on August 2, 2019.

Someone close to the powers that be in Abuja who occasionally shares credible, privileged insider information with me sent me a message this evening (see screenshot) that henchmen of the Buhari regime might be planning to send assassins to murder me in America.

My first inclination was to dismiss this as mere alarmism. But when I recall that Buhari had sent Israeli mercenaries to kidnap Umaru Dikko from London on July 5, 1984 and that his regime hired Israeli agents for a social media dissemination and propaganda campaign this year, according to a May 17, 2019 Associated Press news story titled “Israeli Disinformation Campaign Targeted Nigerian Election,” I realize that the regime is capable of the vilest malevolence imaginable to protect and conceal the unprecedented criminality it’s perpetrating every day in Nigeria.

Several top-level security operatives have told me since 2017 that I would be “toast” if I travel to Nigeria while Buhari is in power. I’ve come to peace with that. But plotting to assassinate me in America just because, out of a patriotic duty to my home country, I've chosen to become the vault of critical news about the Buhari regime’s consuming fascism is beyond the pale—if it’s true.

Agents, friends, and sympathizers of the regime have thrown everything at me—personal attacks, smears, libelous falsehoods, etc. in newspapers and on different websites--and even instructed the management of Daily Trust to stop my Saturday column, but they were like water off a duck's back to me. Their last propaganda effort against me was to commission some fraudsters from Lagos who masqueraded as reporters to claim, without evidence, that I shared false videos during the last election. (The videos were factual even by their own so-called fact-check, so they chose instead to “fact-check” my intentions😂.)

Only numerically inferior bands of nitwitted ethno-regional bigots and government agents believe their smears against me. They are now obviously at their wit’s end and think the only way to silence me is to assassinate me. I hear they’ve arrested Omoyele Sowore tonight for planning mass protests against the incompetence of the regime. I hope they don’t kill him.

Saturday, November 2, 2019

Muhammadu Buhari’s inexplicably frenzied globetrotting at a
time when his government proclaimed a new policy that reduced the frequency and
duration of foreign travels by ministers reputedly as a “cost-saving measure” recalls my September 16, 2017 column where I wondered if Buhari’s wanderlust
is actuated by his resentment of Nigeria itself. I’ve reproduced a slightly
reworked version of the column here:

Muhammadu Buhari is held prisoner by what appears to be an obsessive-compulsive
impulse to desert Nigeria when the going gets tough. On at least two occasions,
he has publicly confessed to feeling the urge to abandon his job in midstream.

The first time he gave public expression to this runawayist
emotion was in November 2016 when he addressed senior management staff members
and “Senior Executive Course 38” graduates of the National Institute for Policy
and Strategic Studies who paid him a visit at the Presidential Villa. “Actually, I felt like absconding because 27 out of 36 states in Nigeria cannot
pay salaries and we know they have no other source than to depend on salaries
to pay rent and do other things,” he said.

He expressed another urge for runawayism when he met with
traditional rulers in the Presidential Villa on September 11, 2017. “We are
lucky this year that last year and this year the rainy season is good,” he
said. “If it were not good, I must confide in you that I was considering which
country to run to. But God answered the prayers of many Nigerians.”

Buhari might very well have been joking. But it is also true
that human beings ventilate uncomfortable truths through humor. In fact, an
English proverb says, “Many a true word is spoken in jest.” So it’s fair game
to interrogate Buhari’s predilection for wanting to abandon the nation in
moments of strife and uncertainty.

This is particularly troubling seeing that Buhari appears to
be more comfortable outside Nigeria than he is inside it. This is a man who
will leave Nigeria for anywhere at the drop of a hat. He spent most of 2015 and
2016 traveling the world (for no justifiable reason, in retrospect) and a good
bit of this year on “medical vacation” in London.

So when he said (or, if you will, joked) that he felt like
“absconding” after the enormity of the task he was obligated to do stared him
in the face, he wasn’t being faithful to the facts. He actually did abscond.
How else would anyone characterize failing to appoint ministers six months
after being sworn in—and leaving most governing councils of government agencies
unfilled more than two years after— while aimlessly traveling the world?

And when he said he was “considering which country to run
to” if the rains weren’t forthcoming, he also forgot that he actually did “run
to” another country for more than 100 days for a different reason. He went to
London to get UK doctors’ second opinion on his already treated ear infection
and, thereafter, to treat an undisclosed ailment—exposing Nigeria, in the
process, to one of the worst possible international embarrassments any nation
could face.

Given Buhari’s penchant for runawayism, it’s hard to tell if
his long stays in London were indeed medically warranted or if he was just
“absconding” or choosing to “run to” other people’s country because he couldn’t
take the heat of governing, which, in any case, he has illegally entrusted to
Abba Kyari.

Plus, his health has now become an effective national
emotional blackmail tool: he “absconds” for days on end without communication
with the people he is supposed to be ruling, allows morbidly ill-natured rumors
about him to fester, then causes photos of him to be posted on social media,
which inflames more ghoulish speculations, and then a stream of extortionately
costly but pointless visits by government officials to London ensues, and, of
course, the nation is whipped into a frenzy of prayers for his convalescence.

When he returns, poor, mentally low-wattage citizens, who
are the victims of his government by “abscondment,” gyrate wildly in futile,
impotent exultation. This melodrama anesthetizes the citizens and helps to
conceal or excuse the man’s incompetence for a while, and life goes on.

This is particularly interesting because more than three
decades ago, Buhari famously said, “This generation and indeed future
generations of Nigerians have no other country they can call their own. We must
stay here and salvage it together.”

Apparently, he never believed a word of what he said because
in February 2016, Buhari told Nigerians in the UK that he had been using his UK
doctors “since 1978 when I was in Petroleum” [i.e., when he was Petroleum
Minister. His daughter also recently told BBC Hausa that she doesn’t speak
fluent Hausa because she lived mostly abroad “with white people” when she was
growing up.]

You can’t “stay and
salvage” your country, especially as a high-ranking government official or a
president, by perpetually disdaining your “country's best hospital for medical
care in Britain,” as the Los Angeles Times of February 20, 2017 said of
Buhari, perpetually vacationing abroad, and sending all your children to school
in the UK.

Given what we now know of Buhari, it’s evident that his
1980s patriotic proclamation was just hollow sloganeering. Recall that on April
27, 2016, he also said, “While this administration will not deny anyone of his
or her fundamental human rights, we will certainly not encourage expending
Nigerian hard earned resources on any government official seeking medical care
abroad, when such can be handled in Nigeria.”

Less than one month after this “patriotic” declaration,
Buhari went to London, not to treat his ear infection (because, according to a
news release signed by Femi Adesina, it had already been “treated” in Nigeria),
but to have UK doctors examine his already “treated” ear “purely out of
precaution.” Can you beat that quantum of hypocrisy and insensitivity?

What does it say about Buhari’s interest in, and
preparedness for, leading Nigeria that he loves to make glib remarks about
wanting to run away from the country he actively sought to rule four times in a
row? What sort of leader tells (or jokes to) his followers that he almost ran
away—and actually does run away— when the country he is mandated to rule gets
hot?

Buhari won election in 2015 precisely because the country
was in a terrible shape and people thought he truly meant it when he said he
would turn things around if he was given the chance to rule again. If the
country wasn’t as bad as it was in 2015, he wouldn’t have had a snowball’s
chance in hell of defeating an incumbent. That was why he lost against Obasanjo
in 2003, against the late Yar’adua in 2007, and against Jonathan in 2011.

To have expected that he wouldn’t contend with the depth of
the rot he interminably whines about betrays a sad, embarrassing, and
disquieting naivety that shows that he wasn’t worthy of his 2015 mandate. And that’s
why he lost reelection in 2019 but rigged the process before, during, and after
the fact to illegitimately hang on to power.

Does Buhari, perhaps, imagine that the presidency is some
sort of a retirement gift to him? Or that he is doing the nation a favor by
agreeing to be a “president”—a weak, bumbling, divisive, ineffective, and
hypocritical “president”?

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About Me

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author, and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he taught journalism for 5 years and won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award." He earned his Master of Science degree in communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication Award. He earned his B.A. in Mass Communication (with minors in English and Political Science) from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student. He writes a weekly column for the Nigerian Tribune. His research has won top awards. Read more about him here: https://www.farooqkperogi.com/p/about-me.html